The Advanced Boolean Expression Language (ABEL) is an obsolete

hardware description language In computer engineering, a hardware description language (HDL) is a specialized computer language used to describe the structure and behavior of electronic circuits, and most commonly, digital logic circuits. A hardware description language e ...

(HDL) and an associated set of design tools for programming

programmable logic device A programmable logic device (PLD) is an electronic component used to build reconfigurable digital circuits. Unlike digital logic constructed using discrete logic gates with fixed functions, a PLD has an undefined function at the time of man ...

s (PLDs). It was created in 1983 by Data I/O Corporation, in Redmond, Washington. ABEL includes both concurrent equation and truth table logic formats as well as a sequential state machine description format. A preprocessor with syntax loosely based on

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unti ...

MACRO-11 MACRO-11 is an assembly language with macro facilities, designed for PDP-11 minicomputer family from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It is the successor to Program Assembler Loader ( PAL-11R), an earlier version of the PDP-11 assembly languag ...

assembly language is also included. In addition to being used for describing

digital logic A logic gate is an idealized or physical device implementing a Boolean function, a logical operation performed on one or more binary inputs that produces a single binary output. Depending on the context, the term may refer to an ideal logic ga ...

, ABEL may also be used to describe test vectors (patterns of inputs and expected outputs) that may be downloaded to a hardware PLD programmer along with the compiled and fuse-mapped PLD programming data. Other PLD design languages originating in the same era include CUPL and PALASM. Since the advent of larger

field-programmable gate array A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturinghence the term '' field-programmable''. The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware ...

s (FPGAs), PLD-specific HDLs have fallen out of favor as standard HDLs such as

Verilog Verilog, standardized as IEEE 1364, is a hardware description language (HDL) used to model electronic systems. It is most commonly used in the design and verification of digital circuits at the register-transfer level of abstraction. It is a ...

and

VHDL The VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL) is a hardware description language (HDL) that can model the behavior and structure of digital systems at multiple levels of abstraction, ranging from the system level down to that of logic gat ...

gained adoption. The ABEL concept and original compiler were created by Russell de Pina of Data I/O's Applied Research Group in 1981. The work was continued by ABEL product development team (led by Dr. Kyu Y. Lee) and included Mary Bailey, Bjorn Benson, Walter Bright, Michael Holley, Charles Olivier, and David Pellerin. After a series of acquisitions, the ABEL toolchain and intellectual property were bought by

Xilinx Xilinx, Inc. ( ) was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company was known for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and creating the fi ...

. Xilinx discontinued support for ABEL in its ISE Design Suite starting with version 11 (released in 2010).

References

External links

* University of Pennsylvania'
''ABEL primer''
as recommended by Walter Bright. ''Dead Link'' * University of Southern Main
''ABEL-HDL Primer''
by

J. Van der Spiegel ''J. The Jewish News of Northern California'', formerly known as ''Jweekly'', is a weekly print newspaper in Northern California, with its online edition updated daily. It is owned and operated by San Francisco Jewish Community Publications In ...

{{Authority control Hardware description languages